Category Archives: US government

Iraqis think the U.S. is in cahoots with the ISIS, and it is hurting the war

The Washington Post reports: On the front lines of the battle against the Islamic State, suspicion of the United States runs deep. Iraqi fighters say they have all seen the videos purportedly showing U.S. helicopters airdropping weapons to the militants, and many claim they have friends and relatives who have witnessed similar instances of collusion.

Ordinary people also have seen the videos, heard the stories and reached the same conclusion — one that might seem absurd to Americans but is widely believed among Iraqis — that the United States is supporting the Islamic State for a variety of pernicious reasons that have to do with asserting U.S. control over Iraq, the wider Middle East and, perhaps, its oil.

“It is not in doubt,” said Mustafa Saadi, who says his friend saw U.S. helicopters delivering bottled water to Islamic State positions. He is a commander in one of the Shiite militias that last month helped push the militants out of the oil refinery near Baiji in northern Iraq alongside the Iraqi army.

The Islamic State is “almost finished,” he said. “They are weak. If only America would stop supporting them, we could defeat them in days.”

U.S. military officials say the charges are too far-fetched to merit a response. “It’s beyond ridiculous,” said Col. Steve Warren, the military’s Baghdad-based spokesman. “There’s clearly no one in the West who buys it, but unfortunately, this is something that a segment of the Iraqi population believes.”

The perception among Iraqis that the United States is somehow in cahoots with the militants it claims to be fighting appears, however, to be widespread across the country’s Sunni-Shiite sectarian divide, and it speaks to more than just the troubling legacy of mistrust that has clouded the United States’ relationship with Iraq since the 2003 invasion and the subsequent withdrawal eight years later.

At a time when attacks by the Islamic State in Paris and elsewhere have intensified calls for tougher action on the ground, such is the level of suspicion with which the United States is viewed in Iraq that it is unclear whether the Obama administration would be able to significantly escalate its involvement even if it wanted to.

“What influence can we have if they think we are supporting the terrorists?” asked Kirk Sowell, an analyst based in neighboring Jordan who publishes the newsletter Inside Iraqi Politics.

In one example of how little leverage the United States now has, Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi pushed back swiftly against an announcement Tuesday by Defense Secretary ­Ashton B. Carter that an expeditionary force of U.S. troops will be dispatched to Iraq to conduct raids, free hostages and capture Islamic State leaders.

Iraq’s semiautonomous region of Kurdistan, where support for the United States remains strong, has said it would welcome more troops. But Abadi indicated they would not be needed.

“There is no need for foreign ground combat troops,” he said in a statement. “Any such support and special operations anywhere in Iraq can only be deployed subject to the approval of the Iraqi Government and in coordination with the Iraqi forces and with full respect to Iraqi sovereignty.”

The allegations of U.S. collusion with the Islamic State are aired regularly in parliament by Shiite politicians and promoted in postings on social media. They are persistent enough to suggest a deliberate campaign on the part of Iran’s allies in Iraq to erode American influence, U.S. officials say.

In one typical recent video that appeared on the Facebook page of a Shiite militia, a lawmaker with the country’s biggest militia group, the Badr Organization, waves apparently new U.S military MREs (meals ready to eat) — one of them chicken and dumplings — allegedly found at a recently captured Islamic State base in Baiji, offering proof, he said, of U.S. support.

“The Iranians and the Iranian-backed Shiite militias are really pushing this line of propaganda, that the United States is supporting ISIL,” Warren said. “It’s part of the Iranian propaganda machine.” [Continue reading…]

The problem doesn’t just apply in Iraq. I have little doubt that there are Americans now reading this report who believe it must be a product of the Pentagon’s propaganda machine, duping gullible journalists in order to conceal “the truth” that ISIS is an American creation!

Such has been the “success” of the internet in spreading conspiracy theories.

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Support grows for U.S. commando raids to fight ISIS

Bloomberg reports: As lawmakers and former Pentagon officials push President Barack Obama to deploy special-operations forces more aggressively against Islamic State, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the U.S. is taking a step in that direction.

“We’re deploying a specialized expeditionary targeting force to assist Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga forces and put even more pressure on ISIL,” Carter told the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, using an acronym for Islamic State. “This force will also be in a position to conduct unilateral operations in Syria.” The new force may start with about 200 personnel, a U.S. official said.

With the attacks in Paris putting new pressure on Obama to show progress in the stalemated war against terrorists, defense analysts are calling for an intensified campaign of raids to disrupt the group’s leadership, gather intelligence and build momentum.

“The goal is to start a chain reaction of intelligence-driven raids that increase in frequency and expand in scope over time,” said Robert Martinage, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations under Obama. “The metric becomes can you disrupt and dismantle the network faster than the enemy can repair and regenerate it?”

A model for such special operations would be the commando raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011. The tactics, honed in hundreds of raids in Iraq and Afghanistan, were developed by groups such as Task Force 714 in Iraq, which joined the intelligence resources of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency with Navy Seal Team Six and Army Delta Force commandos. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS defections mount as death toll rises, U.S. official says

USA Today reports: Defections of Islamic State fighters — a closely watched measure by officials of U.S.-led coalition — have begun to thin the ranks of the militants in Iraq in the last month, intelligence reports and drone footage show.

Wholesale defections, sparsely manned checkpoints and elite foreign fighters pressed into mundane duty indicate that the U.S.-led bombing campaign and advances by Kurdish forces are eroding the forces of the Islamic State, also known as ISIL, said Army Col. Steve Warren, the top spokesman for the counter-ISIL coalition in Baghdad.

Top military officials estimate that the campaign has killed 23,000 Islamic State fighters, raising their death toll by 3,000 since mid-October. Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, who oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East as chief of Central Command, told troops last week in Iraq that the campaign is inflicting maximum pain on the enemy, according to a military official who attended the meeting but who was not authorized to speak publicly about it. [Continue reading…]

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After Paris attacks, air campaign escalates against ISIS oil assets

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Obama administration accused the Syrian government last week of purchasing oil from Islamic State and froze the U.S. assets of a Syrian businessman for allegedly facilitating these transactions.

An air raid by French warplanes on Oct. 23 in the eastern Syrian province of Deir Ezzour severely damaged the Omar field, which supplied most of the extremist group’s oil and was once partly operated by Royal Dutch Shell PLC.

Before the raid, up to 2,000 trucks were lined up at any one time at the installation, but that number has fallen to 200, a Western counterterrorism official said.

After the Nov. 13 terror attacks in the French capital, airstrikes against Islamic State’s oil assets intensified as part of Operation Tidal Wave II, named after the World War II military campaign against Nazi oil assets.

The coalition said five days later it had destroyed 116 tanker trucks near Albu Kamal. On Nov. 23, it said it carried out airstrikes near the cities of Deir Ezzour and Hasakah, smashing 283 tanker trucks that were used by Islamic State to transport oil out of eastern Syria.

“We know that two-thirds of their oil comes from the oil fields we struck” in Deir Ezzour province, Col. Steve Warren, the coalition spokesman, said from Baghdad. “We need to take this away from them so that their operations are more difficult to conduct.”

A raid in Syria in May that killed Islamic State’s finance chief Abu Sayyaf yielded what U.S. officials have described as a trove of material about its operations.

A Western counterterrorism official said the confiscated archive included computer files showing the group’s oil production peaking at 55,000 barrels a day in the months after a wave of airstrikes in October 2014, with sales of up to $46 million a month.

The focus on cutting that stream has emerged as a rare point of agreement between the U.S. and Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose support for Mr. Assad has drawn criticism from the West.

Russian bombers destroyed some 500 oil trucks doing business with Islamic State on Nov. 21 and 22, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. Col. Warren expressed skepticism about the figure, saying the U.S. had seen no evidence the Russians had enough aircraft in theater to bomb such a large number of trucks during that period. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi forces prepare next U.S.-backed attack on ISIS, with Mosul on horizon

The New York Times reports: In Sinjar, Iraq, fighters from the Islamic State carved a network of tunnels. To defend Hawija, Iraq, they erected a 10-foot sand wall. And virtually everywhere they have surrounded their positions with dense minefields of I.E.D.s, backed by machine guns, mortars and suicide bombers.

While a huge act of terrorism in Paris drew the world’s attention to the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the attacks, the group’s primary focus in Iraq and Syria has been a far more traditional military goal: the capture and defense of cities and towns. And in doing so the Islamic State has developed a hybrid style of warfare that combines insurgent and conventional military tactics — vehicles full of explosives used as rolling bombs, and trenches that would be familiar to students of World War I.

Those tactics are being put to the test in Ramadi, Iraq, where an estimated 300 to 400 fighters for the Islamic State, and several hundred additional supporters, have squared off against about 10,000 Iraqi troops. The militant group’s ability to construct elaborate defenses in Ramadi — and to cover them with sniper, machine-gun and mortar fire — has slowed the American-supported campaign. [Continue reading…]

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Kurdish fighters say U.S. special forces have been fighting ISIS for months

The Guardian reports: On a damp afternoon in Iraqi Kurdistan, a 29-year-old peshmerga fighter named Peshawa pulls out his Samsung Galaxy mobile phone, flicks hurriedly through his library until he finds the video he wants, and presses play.

The clip, filmed just after dawn on 11 September, shows four tall and western-looking men in the heat of a battle against Islamic State militants in northern Iraq. “These are the Americans,” says Peshawa in a secretive tone.

One is crouched behind a machine gun firing round after round from the top of a fortified mound; another lies on his front a few feet away, legs outstretched and taking aim at the enemy with a long rifle. A third wields a long-lens camera taking photo after photo, and the last stands back, apparently overseeing the others during the combat south-west of the city of Kirkuk.

The footage, Peshawa says, is evidence that US special forces have been waging a covert war on the frontline in Iraq for months. Such a claim could alter the feverish debate over whether Barack Obama should move farther and faster against Isis in the wake of the Paris attacks.

A string of terrorist atrocities in France, Lebanon and elsewhere has intensified pressure on Obama to take a more aggressive stand against Isis in Iraq and Syria. Having won election promising to end the Iraq war, however, the president has repeatedly insisted that he will not send back ground troops. In June last year he announced the redeployment of up to 300 military advisers there but pledged: “American combat troops are not going to be fighting in Iraq again.”

The US military denies any special operations forces involvement in combat on 11 September or in three other other incidents listed by the peshmerga. Yet in interviews with the Guardian, a dozen Kurdish fighters and commanders said that US special forces troops have been participating in operations against Isis for months.

In another video, dated 11 June, an American soldier wearing the fatigues and insignia of a Kurdish counter-terrorism unit can be seen walking alongside two dozen peshmerga in the aftermath of a seven-hour firefight with Isis militants in the village of Wastana and Saddam settlement, according to the peshmerga who filmed the video.

“Initially, the Americans rained fire on Wastana,” said Major Loqman Mohammed, pointing to the hamlet which remains under Isis control.

None of the peshmerga were willing to publish their photos or video footage for fear of dismissal, but they allowed the Guardian to watch the video and see the images on their mobile phones.

Karwan Hama Tata, a peshmerga volunteer, showed a Guardian reporter a video which appeared to show two Americans in the midst of the battle accompanied by three peshmerga fighters. He said: “They fight and they even fight ahead of the peshmerga. They won’t allow anyone to take photos of them, but they take photos of everyone.” [Continue reading…]

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MSF calls for independent and impartial investigation of U.S. attack on Kunduz hospital

BBC News reports: A US aircraft attacked a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) clinic in the Afghan city of Kunduz because of “human error”, a US military inquiry said.

The investigation found the crew of the AC-130 gunship mistook the clinic for a nearby government building that had been seized by Taliban fighters.

At least 30 civilians were killed in the 3 October attack, amid a campaign to retake Kunduz from Taliban forces.

MSF said the report demonstrates “gross negligence” by the US military.

The group said the incident constituted “violations of the rules of war” and reiterated calls for an “independent and impartial investigation into the attack”. [Continue reading…]

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Climate advocates to Department of Justice: It’s time to prosecute Exxon

Good reports: Members of Congress, presidential candidates, and now at least 350,000 American citizens are calling upon U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to investigate and prosecute Exxon Mobil for intentionally deceiving the public about the science of climate change.

In September, two exclusive investigative reports by the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News, revealed that Exxon’s own scientists were researching climate change, even as the company was spending big money to misinform the public about climate science. The Inside Climate News investigation found that as early as 1977, Exxon’s own scientists were warning management about oil’s role in “potentially catastrophic” global warming.

Many climate advocates – including a growing number of politicians – believe that the deception could well be criminal. Last Thursday, representatives from a number of climate advocacy group – including Climate Hawks Vote, 350.org, the Moms Clean Air Force, the Working Families Party, and Greenpeace USA – delivered over 350,000 signed petitions to the Department of Justice demanding an investigation. [Continue reading…]

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The refugees and the new war

Michael Ignatieff writes: According to the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, since September 11 the US has taken in 784,000 refugees and of these only three have been arrested subsequently on terrorism-related charges.

Fear makes for bad strategy. A better policy starts by remembering a better America. In January 1957, none other than Elvis Presley sang a gospel tune called “There Will Be Peace in the Valley” on The Ed Sullivan Show to encourage Americans to welcome and donate to Hungarian refugees. After the 1975 collapse of South Vietnam, President Ford ordered an interagency task force to resettle 130,000 Vietnamese refugees; and later Jimmy Carter found room in America for Vietnamese boat people. In 1999, in a single month, the US processed four thousand Kosovar refugees through Fort Dix, New Jersey.

These examples show what can be done if the president authorizes rapid refugee clearance in US military installations, and if the US were to process and repatriate refugees directly from the frontline states of Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. As Gerald Knaus of the European Stability Initiative has been urging since September, direct processing in the camps themselves will cut down on deaths by drowning in the Mediterranean. If Europe and the United States show them a safe way out, refugees won’t take their chances by paying smugglers using rubber dinghies.

The Obama administration should say yes to the UNHCR appeal to settle 65,000 refugees on an expedited basis. Refugee agencies across the United States — as well as religious communities from all faiths — have said they will take the lead in resettlement and integration. If the Liberal government in Canada can take in 25,000 refugees directly from Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, and process their security clearance at Canadian army bases, the US can do the same with 65,000.

Taking 65,000 people will only relieve a small portion of a refugee flow of 4.1 million, but it is an essential political gesture designed to encourage other allies — Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina — and other immigrant countries to do their part. The strategic goal is to relieve the pressure on the three frontline states. Refugee resettlement by the US also acknowledges a fact that the refugees themselves are trying to tell us: even if peace eventually comes to their tormented country, there will be no life for all of them back home.

Once the US stops behaving like a bemused bystander, watching a neighbor trying to put out a fire, it can then put pressure on allies and adversaries to make up the shortfall in funding for refugee programs run by the UNHCR and the World Food Program. One of the drivers of the exodus this summer was a sudden reduction in refugee food aid caused by shortfalls in funding. Even now these agencies remain short of what they need to provide shelter and food to the people flooding out of Syria.

Now that ISIS has brought down a Russian aircraft over Sinai and bombed civilians in Paris, Beirut, and Ankara, the US needs to use its refugee policy to help stabilize its allies in the region. The presumption that it can sit out the refugee crisis makes a hugely unwise bet on the stability of Jordan, where refugees amount to 25 percent of the total population; and Lebanon, where largely Sunni refugees, who have hardly any camps, are already destabilizing the agonizingly fragile multiconfessional order; and Turkey, where the burdens of coping with nearly two million refugees are driving the increasingly authoritarian Erdoğan regime into the arms of Vladimir Putin. [Continue reading…]

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How the U.S. Congress and the GOP became friends of Assad and enemies of the Syrian people

Two years ago, Bashar al-Assad said this:


Some observers — especially those currently promoting fear of Syrian refugees — might think this was a prescient warning, but what Assad’s tweet actually expressed was the consistency with which he has stayed on message in his contrived “war on terrorism” and the fact that the flow of refugees would undermine the future of Syria.

Throughout the war, Assad has insisted that his adversaries are all “terrorists.” He wants the continuation of his rule to be perceived as a way of insuring that the threat of terrorism does not grow. Yet anyone who believes this propaganda is willfully ignoring the reality that far from combating the expansion of ISIS, Assad essentially provided an incubator in which it could grow. ISIS and Assad have a symbiotic relationship.

At the same time, as Syrians fled Assad’s barrel bombs, taking refuge in neighboring countries, the regime was prescient in this sense: once the regime’s own supporters lost faith in Syria’s future, taking advantage of their greater resources they would likely head for Europe with little likelihood of returning. As the New York Times reported in September, “Now those departing include more middle-class or wealthy people, more supporters of the government, and more residents of areas that were initially safe.”

Thus, even before the westward flow had begun, Assad wanted to sow fear in the minds of those who would likely offer refuge to people the regime can ill afford to lose. And what better way of exploiting European xenophobia than by referring to such fleeing Syrians as “illegal immigrants” — evidence, I might suggest, that Assad has his own Western media advisers.

(It shouldn’t need saying but I’ll say it anyway: Refugee status must never be made contingent on political affiliations. Syrians fleeing the war, deserve help — irrespective of their religion, sect, or ethnicity.)

The U.S. Congress and the GOP have now become megaphones of Islamophobic fear, portraying Syrian refugees as potential terrorists rather than what they really are — victims of tyranny and terrorism.

In conjunction with this deranged hysteria which across the U.S. is twisting perceptions of Syria, the argument that Assad is the “lesser evil” goes from strength to strength.

Just as Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the 9/11 attacks, saying they were “very good” because they would unite the U.S. and Israel and “strengthen the bond between our two peoples,” Assad must have taken satisfaction in the slaughter in Paris, knowing that it would buttress his argument that he, his allies and the West face a common enemy.

Likewise, as The Guardian notes, the attacks strengthen Iran’s position in Syria:

Ali Alfoneh, senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, said: “President François Hollande, who cannot count on Washington deploying ground forces in Syria, is now reaching out to Iran and Russia to form an alliance in the fight against Daesh [Isis].

“This in turn legitimises Iran’s military engagement in Syria, which Washington considers as one of the root causes of emergence of Daesh in that country. In that sense, the terrorist attacks in Paris came as manna from heaven for Tehran.”

So many commentators have joined in the chorus that warns against the risk of playing into the hands of ISIS, saying that we must avoid rising to provocation and giving the terrorists what they want, and yet at the same time, with barely any protest and plenty of nods of approval, we now move in the direction of giving Assad exactly what he wants.

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The U.S. Holocaust Museum urges lawmakers not to turn their backs on Syrian refugees

Quartz reports: On Monday, Nov. 19, mere hours after legislators voted to pass a bill making it even harder for Syrian refugees to seek refuge in the United States, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum released the following statement:

Acutely aware of the consequences to Jews who were unable to flee Nazism, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum looks with concern upon the current refugee crisis. While recognizing that security concerns must be fully addressed, we should not turn our backs on the thousands of legitimate refugees.

The Museum calls on public figures and citizens to avoid condemning today’s refugees as a group. It is important to remember that many are fleeing because they have been targeted by the Assad regime and ISIS for persecution and in some cases elimination on the basis of their identity.

It’s a statement perhaps reflective of growing sentiments among North America’s Jewish communities; a recollection of policies that kept those fleeing terror and persecution in Nazi-occupied Europe from settling down in the United States. [Continue reading…]

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As Jonathan Pollard walks out of prison, a reminder of why he was there

The release of Jonathan Pollard after serving 30 years in prison for spying on the U.S. isn’t the end of the “free Pollard” campaign. His supporters, who see him as a loyal Zionist, now want him to be able to emigrate to Israel.

For this reason, it’s worth being reminded of the fact that Pollard’s motives for stealing classified documents had little to do with ideology and a lot to do with making money.

In 1998, W. O. Studeman, Sumner Shapiro, J. L. Butts, and T. A. Brooks wrote:

Jonathan Pollard is serving a life sentence for stealing massive amounts of highly classified and extremely sensitive U.S. national security information. In terms of sheer volume of sensitive information betrayed, Jonathan Pollard rivals any of the traitors who have plagued this nation in recent times. Nobody is clamoring for the release of traitors like Aldrich Ames, John Walker or Jerry Whitworth, but Pollard, by manipulating his supporters and conducting a clever public relations campaign both here and in Israel, has managed to generate a small but vocal movement advocating that he be released and allowed to emigrate to Israel, where he expects to be something of a national hero.

We, who are painfully familiar with the case, feel obligated to go on record with the facts regarding Pollard in order to dispel the myths that have arisen from this clever public relations campaign aimed at transforming Pollard from greedy, arrogant betrayer of the American national trust into Pollard, committed Israeli patriot.

Pollard pleaded guilty and therefore never was publicly tried. Thus, the American people never came to know that he offered classified information to three other countries before working for the Israelis and that he offered his services to a fourth country while he was spying for Israel. They also never came to understand that he was being very highly paid for his services — including an impressive nest egg currently in foreign banks — and was negotiating with his Israeli handlers for a raise as he was caught. So much for Jonathan Pollard, ideologue!

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Drone operators see children as ‘fun-sized terrorists’

The Guardian reports: When Michael Haas, a former senior airman with the US air force, looks back on the missions he flew over Afghanistan and other conflict zones in a six-year career operating military drones, one of the things he remembers most vividly is the colorful language airmen would use to describe their targets. A team of three would be sitting, he recalls, in a ground control station in Creech air force base outside Las Vegas, staring at computer screens on to which images would be beamed back from high-powered sensors on Predator drones thousands of miles away.

The aim of the missions was to track, and when the conditions were deemed right, kill suspected insurgents. That’s not how they put it, though. They would talk about “cutting the grass before it grows out of control”, or “pulling the weeds before they overrun the lawn”.

And then there were the children. The airmen would be flying the Predators over a village in the tribal areas of Pakistan, say, when a series of smaller black shadows would appear across their screens – telling them that kids were at the scene.

They called them “fun-sized terrorists”.

Haas is one of four former air force drone operators and technicians who as a group have come forward to the Guardian to register their opposition to the ongoing reliance on the technology as the US military’s modern weaponry of choice. Between them, the four men clocked up more than 20 years of direct experience at the coalface of lethal drone programs and were credited with having assisted in the targeted killings of hundreds of people in conflict zones – many of them almost certainly civilians. [Continue reading…]

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‘The attacks will be spectacular’: How the Bush administration ignored this warning from the CIA months before 9/11

Chris Whipple writes: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The CIA’s famous Presidential Daily Brief, presented to George W. Bush on August 6, 2001, has always been Exhibit A in the case that his administration shrugged off warnings of an Al Qaeda attack. But months earlier, starting in the spring of 2001, the CIA repeatedly and urgently began to warn the White House that an attack was coming.

By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, “it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.” “There were real plots being manifested,” Cofer’s former boss, George Tenet, told me in his first interview in eight years. “The world felt like it was on the edge of eruption. In this time period of June and July, the threat continues to rise. Terrorists were disappearing [as if in hiding, in preparation for an attack]. Camps were closing. Threat reportings on the rise.” The crisis came to a head on July 10. The critical meeting that took place that day was first reported by Bob Woodward in 2006. Tenet also wrote about it in general terms in his 2007 memoir At the Center of the Storm.

But neither he nor Black has spoken about it publicly in such detail until now — or been so emphatic about how specific and pressing their warnings really were. Over the past eight months, in more than a hundred hours of interviews, my partners Jules and Gedeon Naudet and I talked with Tenet and the 11 other living former CIA directors for The Spymasters, a documentary set to air this month on Showtime.

The drama of failed warnings began when Tenet and Black pitched a plan, in the spring of 2001, called “the Blue Sky paper” to Bush’s new national security team. It called for a covert CIA and military campaign to end the Al Qaeda threat—“getting into the Afghan sanctuary, launching a paramilitary operation, creating a bridge with Uzbekistan.” “And the word back,” says Tenet, “‘was ‘we’re not quite ready to consider this. We don’t want the clock to start ticking.’” (Translation: they did not want a paper trail to show that they’d been warned.) Black, a charismatic ex-operative who had helped the French arrest the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, says the Bush team just didn’t get the new threat: “I think they were mentally stuck back eight years [before]. They were used to terrorists being Euro-lefties—they drink champagne by night, blow things up during the day, how bad can this be? And it was a very difficult sell to communicate the urgency to this.”

That morning of July 10, the head of the agency’s Al Qaeda unit, Richard Blee, burst into Black’s office. “And he says, ‘Chief, this is it. Roof’s fallen in,’” recounts Black. “The information that we had compiled was absolutely compelling. It was multiple-sourced. And it was sort of the last straw.” Black and his deputy rushed to the director’s office to brief Tenet. All agreed an urgent meeting at the White House was needed. Tenet picked up the white phone to Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. “I said, ‘Condi, I have to come see you,’” Tenet remembers. “It was one of the rare times in my seven years as director where I said, ‘I have to come see you. We’re comin’ right now. We have to get there.’” [Continue reading…]

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After Paris attacks, CIA director rekindles debate over surveillance

Scott Shane writes: A diabolical range of recent attacks claimed by the Islamic State — a Russian airliner blown up in Egypt, a double suicide bombing in Beirut and Friday’s ghastly assaults on Paris — has rekindled a debate over the proper limits of government surveillance in an age of terrorist mayhem.

On Monday, in unusually raw language, John Brennan, the C.I.A. director, denounced what he called “hand-wringing” over intrusive government spying and said leaks about intelligence programs had made it harder to identify the “murderous sociopaths” of the Islamic State.

Mr. Brennan appeared to be speaking mainly of the disclosures since 2013 of the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of phone and Internet communications by Edward J. Snowden, which prompted sharp criticism, lawsuits and new restrictions on electronic spying in the United States and in Europe.

In the wake of the 129 deaths in Paris, Mr. Brennan and some other officials sounded eager to reopen a clamorous argument over surveillance in which critics of the spy agencies had seemed to hold an advantage in recent years.

“As far as I know, there’s no evidence the French lacked some kind of surveillance authority that would have made a difference,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “When we’ve invested new powers in the government in response to events like the Paris attacks, they have often been abused.”

The debate over the proper limits on government dates to the origins of the United States, with periodic overreaching in the name of security being curtailed in the interest of liberty. This era of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State in some ways resembles battles that American and European authorities fought in the late 1800s with anarchists who carried out a wave of assassinations and bombings, provoking a huge increase in police powers, said Audrey Kurth Cronin, a historian of terrorism at George Mason University.

Since then, there were the excesses of McCarthyism exploiting fears of Communist infiltration in the 1950s, the exposure of domestic spying and C.I.A. assassination plots in the 1970s, and the battles over torture, secret detention and drone strikes since Sept. 11, 2001. [Continue reading…]

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Inside Sinjar: ‘It is liberated, but how can we come back?’

Mike Giglio reports: The young soldier paused to take a somber selfie on the battered street. Kurdish forces had just cleared ISIS from the town of Sinjar, but unlike some of his comrades who sent bursts of gunfire into the air, 20-year-old Azhar Khalaf Shamo wasn’t celebrating. He was from this town, and he knew this street — he stood in front of what had been a family-run store. But now the entire block, like seemingly every block in Sinjar, was reduced to rubble and metal scraps. “It’s totally destroyed,” he said. “No place looks like before. Yes, it is liberated. But how can we come back?”

Sinjar became famous as the site of ISIS’s worst atrocities — after overrunning the region in August 2014, the group massacred thousands of members of the Yazidi religious sect that calls it home. President Obama cited the need to protect them when announcing the start of U.S. airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq.

Yet as ethnic Kurdish forces, backed by the strikes, rolled triumphantly back into the city on Friday, Shamo seemed to be wondering what was left to save. He had lost seven siblings to ISIS’s rampage; more than 2,500 Yazidis are still believed to remain in control of ISIS as slaves. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The end of Isis rule came surprisingly easily. Fighter jets that had steadily picked off targets in the city over the past year intensified their attacks from Wednesday night. By Friday there was little left in the city to hit. Nearly every home had been damaged, roads had been pockmarked with craters, and power lines criss-crossed rubble like fallen spider webs.

Another Iraqi policeman, Corporal Ismael, also a Yazidi, picked his way through the litter of the war as he outlined how he and his family, who were in a refugee camp near Duhok, would soon try their luck on the migrant route across the Mediterranean. “I have saved all the money and soon I can get them out,” he said. “It is better to die in the ocean near Turkey than to come back to this.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. steps up its attacks on ISIS-controlled oil fields in Syria

The New York Times reports: The United States and its allies have sharply increased their airstrikes against the sprawling oil fields that the Islamic State controls in eastern Syria in an effort to disrupt one of the terrorist group’s main sources of revenue, American officials said this week.

For months, the United States has been frustrated by the Islamic State’s ability to keep producing and exporting oil — what Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter recently called “a critical pillar of the financial infrastructure” of the group — which generates about $40 million a month, or nearly $500 million a year, according to Treasury Department estimates.

While the American-led air campaign has conducted periodic airstrikes against oil refineries and other production facilities in eastern Syria that the group controls, the organization’s engineers have been able to quickly repair damage, and keep the oil flowing, American officials said. The Obama administration has also balked at attacking the Islamic State’s fleet of tanker trucks — its main distribution network — fearing civilian casualties.

But now the administration has decided to increase the attacks and focus on inflicting damage that takes longer to fix or requires specially ordered parts, American officials said.

The first evidence of the new strategy came on Oct. 21, when B-1 bombers and other allied warplanes hit 26 targets in the Omar oil field, one of the two largest oil-production sites in all of Syria. American military analysts estimate the Omar field generates $1.7 million to $5.1 million per month for the Islamic State. French warplanes struck another oil field nearby earlier this week.

The goal of the operation over the next several weeks is to cripple eight major oil fields, about two-thirds of the refineries and other oil-production sites controlled by the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. made huge effort to kill ‘Jihadi John’ but couldn’t make half that effort to save his victims, says James Foley’s mother

The Daily Beast reports: ISIS’s most famous executioner, Mohammed Emwazi — best known as “Jihadi John” — was targeted in a U.S. airstrike in Syria early Friday morning, according to a senior U.S. administration official.

Emwazi was suspected of carrying out dozens of executions for the so-called Islamic State, including the beheading of American journalist James Foley and other American hostages.

The results of the strike are still being assessed, so Emwazi’s death cannot yet be confirmed, the senior administration official told The Daily Beast.

“This isn’t about avenging deaths but removing a despicable individual who committed brutal murders under the false pretense of a bankrupt and hijacked ideology,” the official said.

A U.S. defense official told The Daily Beast that the U.S. military followed Emwazi for the better part of a day leading up to the strike, which happened as he left a building. While officials cannot officially say he is dead — and won’t be able to for some time — they are all but certain.

“We are pretty damn sure he is dead,” the defense official said. [Continue reading…]

ABC News reports: Diane Foley, mother of James Foley, told ABC News after hearing of Emwazi’s possible demise that it was “small solace” to the family.

“This huge effort to go after this deranged man filled with hate when they can’t make half that effort to save the hostages while those young Americans were still alive,” said Foley, who has been a vocal critic of American hostage policy. “It’s unfortunate that the government doesn’t get it. They think it gives us solace, but it doesn’t.”

The family of Steven Sotloff, who was also shown beheaded in one of Emwazi’s videos, was similarly somber about the news.

“This development doesn’t change anything for us; it’s too little too late,” the family said in a statement provided to ABC News. [Continue reading…]

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